BiggerPockets Money Podcast - How to Negotiate Your Salary and Reach Financial Independence Faster | Paula Pant

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Want to reach financial independence faster? The quickest path isn't extreme frugality—it's earning more. And that starts with salary negotiation. Paula Pant from the Afford Anything podcast joins Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench to break down exactly how to negotiate your salary, whether you're asking for a raise, negotiating a job offer, or realizing you're chronically underpaid. Paula shares her personal negotiation journey, the strategies that worked (and what didn't), and the mindset shifts that helped her confidently ask for more. This Episode Covers: Paula Pant's personal salary negotiation experiences and lessons learned How to determine your true market value (beyond salary surveys) Understanding the employer's perspective in negotiations BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) and why it's your secret weapon Daily negotiation practice: building the skill in low-stakes situations Using scorecards and performance reviews to document your value Perfect timing for asking for a raise (and when NOT to ask) How to set yourself up for a promotion before you ask Negotiating strategies in tough job markets and recessions Aligning your incentives with your employer's goals Whether you're early in your career, a seasoned professional, or someone who's never negotiated before, Paula's practical advice will help you earn more and reach financial independence faster. Every successful negotiation adds years of compounding returns to your FIRE timeline. Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter: www.biggerpocketsmoney.com Want to be a guest on the show? Apply here: https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/contact/ Get 50% Off Your First Year of Monarch by using code ‘Pockets’: https://www.monarchmoney.com/ Connect with Paula Pant: Website: https://affordanything.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulapant Connect with Scott and Mindy: Scott: https://www.instagram.com/scott_trench/ Mindy: https://www.instagram.com/_mindyatbp/ Follow BiggerPockets Money on Social: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BPMoney Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biggerpocketsmoney/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paula Pant, from Afford Anything is joining us today to talk about one of the fastest ways to accelerate your financial independence. That is negotiating your salary. Today, she's breaking down exactly how to ask for more money and why most people leave thousands of dollars on the table by not negotiating. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me, as always, is my wants to help you negotiate co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy, great to be here. Love talking about how to work from your personal finances from a position of strength.

Key to Negotiation here on Bigger Pockets Money. We are so excited to welcome Paula Pant back to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. Paula hosts the awesome podcast, Afford Anything. She's been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and on the Netflix series, Get Smart with Money. We are so excited to have her back on today. Without further ado, welcome back. Paula. Thank you.

Thank you so much for welcoming me back. I'm glad to be here. Awesome. Well, we're going to be talking about negotiating today. And so can you give us a brief kind of primer on how many times you've negotiated in your career? When I used to be an employee, I did not really know how to negotiate. I did not know how to push for more. And I often wonder how much I left on the table by virtue of taking whatever I could get because I was happy to have a job.

Then when I became a freelancer, I was working with a wide variety of clients. and every single contract was a negotiation not just on rate but on scope, on timeline, on deliverables, on number of revisions. And so every single one of those things had to be negotiated. And I'd say when I was a freelancer, I probably at any given time, had between six to ten clients. So those were like the number of contracts that I had going on. But then I would also have contractors working under me. And so for the contractors, there were separate negotiations there as well, you know, subcontractors. Like, great, who am I handing a portion of this workout to and how is that arrangement going to happen?

With real estate, of course, on the topic of contractors, with real estate, you know, every time that you talk to either a general contractor, an electrician, a plumber, an HVAC person, every single one of those is a negotiation. In addition to the obvious negotiation of working with agents, bidding for a home, going under contract. getting the inspection report, asking for repairs or concessions, then you close the deal, then you're talking to property managers and seeing which property manager you're going to go with and how that's going to be organized. All of those are like multiple negotiations. And then now in my capacity as an employer, every time that I bring an employee, either a 1099 contractor or a W2 employee into the fold, there's an initial negotiation. when they first come on board,

and then ongoing negotiations throughout their tenure of promotions, raises, and changing scopes of work because what a person is responsible for tends to shift. Let's talk about this from the concept of, I think the typical person

who's listening to this, there's going to be some small business owners, of course, as well in the mix. But I think the typical person is someone who's a good income earner has a good job and is a little worried right now, like, hey, I don't think

I'm going to get a real, raise at the end of this year because, you know, I'm hearing about all the AI challenges and layoffs. I'll be lucky to keep my job, but I still feel underpaid. I want to get more money in there. How do I approach that negotiation both maybe in a short, medium, and long-term sense? How do I set myself up for that discussion with my employer, even when I'm maybe worried about the external environment and I might get a hard no or worse? So the first thing that I'd want to say is if you're envisioning getting a hard no or worse, then you're envisioning a worst-case scenario.

You're sort of mentally catastrophizing. And a lot of people will do that and then not seek more because they're catastrophizing inside of their mind. And by contrast, there's the hard pendulum swing on the other side where people come in with this entitlement of like, I'm indispensable and I deserve it. And that's also, frankly, detached from reality for most people. Most people are frankly not indispensable to their company unless you try. truly embody what's known as key man risk or key person risk, right?

Outside of that, most people are dispensable. And so you don't want to hug either of those extreme ends of the pendulum swing. Instead, what you want to do is begin from a standpoint in which you're trying to see things from the counterparty's point of view. So if you're an employee at a company, the first question that you want to ask yourself is, and as you go up the chain, right, at the highest level, What does the board want? What does the CEO want? What are their objectives? And then as you go down that chain, what is my direct managers? What are their objectives? What are their goals? What could I do that would make this a great year for them that could alleviate their stress or make them proud of what they've accomplished? And then my skip level, you know, what do they want? What are their goals? What are their objectives? What are their pain points? How do I solve these questions for them? And so starting from that position of what's the counterparty's perspective? what can I do to be enormously valuable to them, not in a self-effacing way, but in a, you know,

let's be strategic about what it is I do and conversely what it is I don't do so that I can provide maximum value in a well-documented format such that when it comes time for those performance conversations and the compensation conversations, we have some documentation, we have some added scope that I took on, we have some performance that I have brought to this team and compensation can be framed in that regard. How do you determine what your market value is as an employee when you have this kind of weird job where there's there's not salary data or it's like, well, you kind of do this and you kind of do this and this one pays 10,000, that one pays 50,000, that one pays 100,000? Like, well, which one am I?

So the first thing that I want everyone to do, there's this concept in negotiation that's called Batna. It stands for best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Batna is essentially a fancy way of asking the question, what's my next best alternative? Now, this is not a conversation that you should have with your boss. This is something that you should only do internally. Take an evening or take a weekend day to sit down and think to yourself, all right, if I did not have this job, what is my next best alternative. And for most people, there isn't one singular next best. You might have an array of four or five different options depending on how you want to branch or pivot. But, you know, what are my next best alternatives plural? If I wasn't doing this, what would I be doing? Map out what that is?

What kind of direct wage compensation would I get? Would it be remote work or in-person work or hybrid? What would my vacation and sick policy be? Could I bring pets to the office? Do I get a parking spot? I mean, get that granular. What would the parental leave policies be? What kind of professional development budget would I have if I wanted to use some professional development budget to go to conferences or enroll in continue education courses? Get really granular about what that next best alternative would be because when you know your batina, you can come to every negotiation internally from a position of strength because you know that next best alternative. And by the way, that works both ways because sometimes, and I see this a lot in small businesses, especially if their

revenue is declining or they're facing some type of a challenge, the owner will say, hey, we all got to step up because we're facing these headwinds. And sometimes employees will push back and say, no, no, no, we have to protect our work life balance. And, you know, everybody on TikTok tells me that, you know, never stay past 5 p.m. That's just your boss getting work from you for free. And particularly if you are a highly empathetic leader, you can sometimes take on too much of that yourself by saying, all right, the team doesn't want to stay late. I'll pick up the slack. And you'll see that in team leads. You'll see that in founders. You'll see that. The people pleasing people in an organization will sometimes pick up more of the slack because others are saying no. And they're like, all right, that's fine. I can shoulder this. You know, what allows you to assert your own needs is knowing that that, nah, like knowing. All right, you know what? Maybe you're not willing to stay past 5 p.m. But there are definitely other people out there who would also be qualified for this job, who are willing to do that. And given the needs for this role, like, no hard feelings, but maybe you're just not a good fit.

Sorry, this is a four-person company. If you're not willing to step up when things get challenging, then maybe you're not a good fit. And so it works both ways in that regard. Knowing your Batna as a W-2 employee allows you to have a really good sense of, what am I getting paid and not just in terms of wages, but what is my overall compensation structure in the broadest sense of the word? What does that look like here and what could it look like elsewhere? And if you know that what you've already got is a heck of a lot better than anything you could find elsewhere, that's information. That's going to give you a very different standpoint than if what you have is comparable. to five other options.

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And that happened in mass. And so you saw wages really skyrocket for a bunch of folks. Now, however, many of those firms are requiring people to come back into the office or do some kind of hybrid work or are doing layoffs and just cutting head count in a general sense. And so this person that got a big raise, 30, 40 percent, it was incredible how much power the worker had in the hiring environment in 2021 and 2022 in the technology. in the technology space in particular, and how hard it was to find good talent and to get outputs. He wants someone to come out,

you know, work on a project past a few, you know, a cutoff there. That has changed, I think, in a really core way, in a way people really understand and feel on our everyday basis in the technology sector specifically. And so I think that the problem a lot of people have, again, most acute in the technology sector, but still felt in other sectors,

is my battena has so much. much worse. It's so much worse. I mean, if I lose this job, I'm going to have to go into the office several days a week and I'm going to get paid 20, 25% less. Walk me through, you know, I'm catastrophizing here, as you say, but walk reassure someone who's listening to this or tell us how it is. How do I, how do I confront that in a productive way? So if you're having a one-on-one conversation with somebody else, let's say you are currently employed, but you're worried about the fact that you assume that you have a weak batna or you get a sense that you have a weak batna. You're currently employed and you want to see how you can maximize that current employment.

There are a couple of other concepts that I want to introduce. So each person has what's called an aspiration point and a reservation point, which is fancy ways of saying, your reasonable best case scenario, your reasonable worst case scenario. Everyone has a reservation point that below which, it's so bad that you just wouldn't work that job anymore, right? If your boss came to you and said from now on, oh, just use an extreme. From now on, everybody's making 60% less than they used to from this moment forward. I mean, most people would quit. Most people wouldn't say, oh, I still get 40.

You know, that would be such a blow that most people would quit, right? It's an extreme example, but it's meant to illustrate that everyone has a reservation point. Similarly, everybody has some kind of an aspiration point. If you could wave a magic wand and create something that's still within the realm of reasonable, but, you know, the highest possible realm of reasonable, what would that look like? Everything in between your reservation and aspiration point, that's your personal Zopa or Zone of Potential Agreement, right? So you have a Zopa, and then your boss or whoever it is who makes compensation decisions at your company, they also have a Zopa as it relates to you.

So your job is to try to figure out the other party's Zopa. And the more that you can do this in small matters, remember we began by talking about how everybody negotiates every day and matters both big and small. The issue that we have, particularly in the United States, is that most people don't have overt experience with negotiation unless it's for a couple of key big ticket items. That's not true in many other countries. In many other countries, you go to the market and you're negotiating over the cost of a bag of oranges or the cost of a sweater. And so you get on a daily basis very low stakes, small scale practice at how to negotiate. And then you can go home and say, oh, you know what? I was buying a pair of socks earlier today.

And I think I totally just whiffed it. In retrospect, I would have said this differently. I would have done that differently. And because you're getting that daily practice in these extremely low-stakes situations, then when it comes time for the big ticket items, you're going in having put in your reps. And in the U.S., we typically don't do that. And so what I would encourage any W-2 employee to do, when you start on a daily basis, start asking questions to try to figure out the other person's aspiration and reservation

and reservation point, their worst case and best case, so that you can get a sense of what their Zopa is and how it intersects with yours. And so a very simple example is to go to Facebook marketplace and look for a fish aquarium look for a coffee table, right? Look for some low-stakes item. You know, not every seller is necessarily going to be willing to engage in an ongoing conversation. That's okay. You don't need every seller. You know, if a seller doesn't want to engage, thank you, move on. But for the sellers who are willing to engage, have those conversations around, all right, tell me about this coffee table. How long have you had it? Like, what memories do you have that's associated with it? Is it important to you

that this goes to a home where it's going to get refurbished and treated really well and not a home where it's going to be, you know, kicked around and then thrown out within a year. For some people, that's important. For others, it's not. Practice that when it comes to these small-scale decisions so that when you're having these conversations with your manager or your hiring director, you can carry that lesson in. All right, tell me about this role. Like, when this role was originally created, what did you think this role was going to be? And in the way that this role has actually played out in this company over the last six months, how has the day to day of what this role has turned into, how is that similar to or different from what it was originally created to be? And do you like

the new direction that this is going in? Or do we need a course correct here? Maybe this originally started as an advisory role, but now it's morphed into more of an operations role because there's too big of an implementation gap. Or maybe this has originally started as a role where there was supposed to be a major public-facing element. But what it has actually turned into is more of a behind-the-scenes operational role in which we're really just trying to put better processes in place. And there's so much time spent involved in doing that that we haven't been able to make optimal use of public-facing talent. And does that mean that this role should be rethought of or separated out? Or, you know, like, these are the structuring conversations that

can often lead to major changes in compensation and in scope. And particularly, sorry to make this a very long answer, you talked about technology companies in particular as we move into the world of AI. There's that expression. I think Scott Galloway was the one who said it. I might be misquoting, but, or misattributing, it's AI is not going to take your job. People who know how to use AI are going to take your job. In a world of AI advancement, how is your company thinking about in a.I. into its processes. What opportunities are they excited about? What risks are they worried about? How can you occupy your position in a way in which you are capitalizing on AI to make your position more efficient while also mitigating any of those risks? Like, how can you be their AI smart person who occupies

that role? So, Scott, I'm curious about your answer to this exact same question because you were the CEO of Bigger Pockets. At one point, we had, what, like 125-ish employees. So how do you feel about AI's role coming into prevalence, I guess? I would observe some of the great things that Paula said here and just react from a standpoint of an employer or a hiring manager in this negotiation context, right? And this was not in place when I started at Bigger Pockets in early in my 10 years of leadership, but we got there. We evolved towards this by the end. And basically, my approach to negotiation, was we would say, who is the ideal candidate for this job? And if we could wave a magic wand and poach anybody we wanted from the entire industry,

who would be our first round draft pick, second round draft pick, so on and so forth for that. Here are the job requirements and what we need done. And good looks like this. This activity set is going to be completed. And these numbers are going to go up, right, or down if they're a bad number going down. And that's what we need the person to do. And in the interview process, we would outline those to the new executive. and we would say, do you, you know, but present a plan to do this, basically.

And they would come in and tell us what they were going to do. And then that would translate to the first year's scorecard, as I called it. This would be, the scorecard was a single-page document that said, here's what I need you to do, and here's what numbers need to move as a result of that activity set. And at the end of the year, I would then provide a performance review and a new scorecard based on what had been achieved. And where we would have a problem, a negotiation standpoint, would be if the activity set wasn't completed and the numbers didn't move, right? Sometimes the activity, you know,

the various things there, but that would be where there's a problem. And where we wouldn't have a problem, would have a very simple conversation is when the activity set was completed and the numbers moved up. In between, we had to kind of parse out. What happened? We did what we said we were going to do, but we didn't get the result we wanted. What was the diagnosis there? And from there, we'd have a discussion around it. But that was the core negotiation in this context that happened every year at bigger pockets within the executive team that I managed. Now, that happened to varying degrees down the chain with their direct reports and from managers, as everyone kind of brought a little bit of their style or twist to bear on the subject.

But I think what Paul is saying is manufacture that same outcome in reverse, because not everybody has that inside of an organization, right? But if you do have that, you say, here's I need to do, and here's what good looks like in terms of outputs, the numbers that will move from that, you can know whether you're on or off track. Complete your activity set. Do the things that you need to get done. The activities need to get done. and then keep an eye on the outcomes, the numbers that are supposed to move as a result of that and make sure those are moving in the right direction. And that's going to set you up for a much better negotiation on this.

Sorry, I'll answer the AI question a second. But Paula, any thoughts or reactions to that? What I love about the scorecard is there's so much clarity around expectation and measurement, right? There's so much clarity around this is what I'm supposed to do. These are the numbers I'm supposed to move. Like, as an employee, if I want to know how do I succeed in this role, boom, that scorecard answers that question. And so if you're an employee who wants to get a raise, I mean, your job is nail that scorecard,

right? Like, that's job number one. And it's amazing sometimes, too. You give this artifact to somebody and then six months go by and they haven't done it on there. And they're like, it's like, come on. Like, what's going on here? That allows that conversation to happen very rapidly as a leader. That's really important to have that, to have that in place.

And I was guilty of sometimes of letting that go for six months and saying, come on, man. We said this is the first thing in the hiring process you're going to do. Why aren't we here yet? What's going on? Is there a resource problem? Is there something else going in there? And that helps with these negotiations. It's clear.

And it's not this kind of like, how do I approach this situation? Like, how do I bring up this feedback? It's really awkward. No, it's right there at the top of your list. What's going to happen here? And I think that's what you need to have with your employer if you're listening to this, right? Hey, you said that I would be in great shape for. that bonus, that promotion, that next raise, if I completed this activity set, I completed it.

Look how high quality the outputs are in here. Anybody would agree that these are really high quality outputs. And look, the numbers moved too in the right direction. Surely that puts me in good position for this next negotiation, this raise, right? What's going on? What has changed since that last conversation? Those are all things that you can do to greatly increase your power in a negotiation setting. And I would suggest to anybody who doesn't have a scorecard, because I love the scorecard model, if your employer doesn't provide a scorecard like that, design something of your own, at least for your own role, and take it to your manager or the appropriate person in your company and say, present it to them and say,

let's, you know, what do you think about this? Can we evaluate my performance within this context within the next quarter or within the next six months? And that would be a really good way, for them to say, you know what, I'm looking at that activity set and you're missing X, Y, and Z. Or I see that X, Y, and Z is included here, and I don't really think that that is important, or maybe that's a little bit outside. I know that you've been handling that, but that is technically outside of the scope of your role, and I'd rather that you focus your time on A, B, and C. So even the formation of that scorecard itself can add a lot of clarity.

Yeah, and by the way, just give it credit where it's due, I did not come up with this concept, like everything else, like most other things, I read it in a book. The book is called Who, A Method for Hiring, Not to be confused in another book called Who Not How. That's a different book. Who, a method for hiring. It's kind of dense. It's really for someone who's hiring executives in there, but that was a read that really impacted me and really changed my life and I think allowed us to find and manage some really great executives at bigger pockets over the years. Oh, that's wonderful. I've got a question for both of you. Paula, I'm going to ask you first. How do you add in intangibles into your market value? Things like, I've been here for 10 years and I wrote

all the processes over the last 10 years. I know how everything works. I know like you got to push this button, even though you don't know that you got to push this button. Or I haven't been here very long, but I've shown consistency in a turbulent environment and I'm, you know, everybody here knows that they can count on me and, you know, I keep my word because we've all worked with the guy who doesn't. So how do you factor these in when you're talking to your boss during that negotiation for an increase in salary? Why this as a mental model, drop the word I, because then the rule number one of negotiation is you want empathy for the counterparty. You want to be able to see things from their point of view so that you can demonstrate that their needs are being served. And this almost

sounds counterintuitive, but rather than make it about yourself, begin from a position of sounds like you really value X, Y, and Z. Sounds like you are really worried about A, B, and C. Start from the position of what's on their mind? What are they concerned with? And then, in the context of that, here's how we can solve this problem. Here's actually a look back on some of the things that my team and I have been involved with that have already started to address this problem. And here are some of the additional things that we can do to continue solving this problem. Do you have anything to add? I think that's a wonderful framework in there.

I think that if you are one of those people that is in a position where you don't have clarity from your boss in there, that means something's wrong in a more general sense. Like there should be some level of this already in place from your manager. You could be a grading scale from 1 to 10, maybe you're out of 2 in there, but there should be some flavor of this. And I think that if your organization is really weak at performance management, at least in documentation of performance management, then you can just bring that to the table for your boss at your next 101. Surely you're going to have one of those and you say, hey, I have something to talk to you about. I'm ambitious to get ahead in my life.

These are the just used Paula's strategy. Sounds like this, this and this. Is it okay if I come back next week with a scorecard or written set of deliverables for next year for your review? And if I hit those, can I, you know, get some reassurances that I'll be on track for that next promotion or that next raise? in there. I think her framework is perfect for approaching that. It's about once you understand that, then documenting it and making sure that you actually do all of those things to slowly but surely increase your leverage. Yeah, I love the word documentation, Scott. Back on episode 169 with Aaron Lowry, we started talking about how to ask for a raise, and she talked about documenting it.

And I'm sure you have had conversations with people who are like, hey, Scott, I want to raise. And you're like, okay, why? And they're like, um, because I want more money. Like, they don't have anything to back it up. One of the key things that I got from Aaron's episode was she's like, keep a praise folder in your inbox. And anytime anybody sends you anything that says, thank you, throw it in there. You were so great at this, throw it in there.

So when it's time to ask your boss for a raise, because you don't do it every day, when it's time to ask, you just go into the praise folder and print it all out than, you know, taking Paula's tips to. much, Paula, for all these tips because I'm like, oh, yeah, I did that wrong when I asked for a raise. I did that wrong when I asked for a raise. I've done a lot of things wrong asking for raises in my past life. I got another one for you here. This is some inside baseball, but many companies, especially not, you know, not small, tiny businesses, but anybody that's a fairly serious business or many, most of them will have some kind of annual budgeting process, right?

So the number for your raise is already baked in to next year's budget, right? So you really got to start this process about a year in advance, ideally in like the September to June timeframe, because what's going to happen is your boss is going to get X amount to give you a raise in January in many cases, right? This may not be true at the very highest levels, but if you're in a big department, they're going to get a four or five or whatever percentage it is for that year increase for the employee compensation pool. And so what you want to do, if that's the case, is you want to have that conversation at June, July, or September with your boss, and you want to say, what do I need to do to get a promotion next year around the same time? And then they can put that

promotion into the budget, right? And now we can, everyone's happy, right? Because there's a real problem is, hey, we're trying to hit this budget that we said a year ago. And I can't do that if I have to award all these off-cycle promotions that I wasn't planning on that weren't in there. But as long as that's already in the plan for next year, then I know, then I know we can do that. And the only way I'm not going to word it is if this goes very, very poorly wrong. So that's something to think about here on these things is if you go into one of these negotiations and you're like, hey, I want to raise this year and I'm going to be all messed up about it if I don't get it. That's going to be a problem for you. But if you have a little bit longer term view with your employer and you're setting this,

you're setting yourself up for these cadence items about a year in advance and you understand this annual cycle, that can really play to your advantage over time because you can get in the, you can get, hey, boss, I want to set you up. I really want a promotion next September. You have that conversation now in January, it feels it's too far away. But if you have it in July of next year, okay, now we're cooking. Now we can actually think about doing that. And they know their numbers. They need to report up the chain.

And so it goes. So that's kind of some inside baseball in there. I don't know if that's every company, but I bet you a lot of companies work in that world where, hey, there's an annual budget. And once we start getting asking for requests outside that annual budget, things better be going to be going to be well. Because if they're not, then the answer is going to be now. Well, what is your advice for somebody who has been underpaid for a significant period of time and feels like they've been left behind?

The first thing I would ask that person is why have they allowed themselves to be underpaid for a significant period of time? So the very first question is actually internal because it's one thing to be underpaid for six months before asking for an improvement in the position. But if you've been chronically underpaid for five years, speaking frankly, it sounds like a lot. little bit of a you problem, right? Why have you allowed yourself to be chronically underpaid for a very long time? What is it that's stopping you from either asking for more in your current role or finding some alternative employment that might be able to provide you with more? And sometimes there are very legitimate answers. Sometimes the answer is, well, it's because I work for a very small nonprofit organization that relies on a tiny handful of donations. And I know what their

budget is because I've read the IRS 990 forms, which are free and available to the public. I know the revenue of this nonprofit and it's not very big and if I want to continue working with them, then I know that this is all they can give me. And if that's the reason, then I applaud that if you've made a conscious decision that you are going to accept a lower level of compensation because that's the type of organization that you've chosen to work for. If you're able to do that, I think that's a very valid conscious choice, but that's a very different situation than, hey, I'm just a cog in the machine at this much bigger organization. And I don't actually know what their budget is.

I don't know what their numbers are. I just generally feel like chopped liver. And I've been feeling that way for a while. What do you do if your batina is way worse? I think another way of stating that is, and this is not the way people will feel about it, but you're overpaid, right? from the employer's perspective, you're overpaid, you know, and they could replace you with someone cheaper that could do the same job. How do you handle that? What's, what's an action

set you can do so you can lessen the blow of that problem manifesting one day? That's a really good, actually, it's a great way of framing what happens if your batten is not that good. You know, the pessimistic view is like, man, I'm stuck here. The optimistic view is, wow, I'm way overpaid. I'm never going to find anything that's quite as good as this. Then it becomes respecting how good you have it, I think what can often happen. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about the sense of indispensability. If a person is overpaid or overcompensated, and particularly in an organization where the hierarchy is flat or somewhat flat, even if it isn't overtly flat, if the relational elements of hierarchy tend to be flat if people lead relationally rather than authoritatively,

if decisions are made through conversation and explanation rather than through directive. A combination of having influence in a system, a flattened hierarchy, and a high degree of compensation, those together can often make somebody feel indispensable to a company. And where that slips into is then they feel entitled. And then they can start to adopt the feeling that this company is a V-Eyield. that should support their life rather than this company is an employer and they provide labor to that employer in exchange for compensation. Because what happens if a sense of indispensability slips into entitlement and slips into believing that the company is there to support them

and not vice versa, that's when situations arise where they end up doing the minimum possible, you know, to quote office space, doing just enough to not get fired because sometimes being overcompensated can lead a person to think that they are more valuable than they are. Then ultimately they do get fired and learn the hard way that that's not the case. If you are overcompensated, goal number one is to never take it for granted. Like objective number one is to never take it for granted and to not let it go to your head and to be hyper aware of the fact that you are overcompensated. And that means that you need to over provide value as a result. I think that's really, really wise. I love the way you put that because I think that in

some of those cases that resentment can almost build because there's lack of advancement opportunity for that person. And so they almost resent the situation that is really a gift from the employer in that situation. I think your mentality is much, much, much healthier. And even if a batna comes up in the future, you can leave gracefully in those situations rather than allowing that resentment to kind of build up over time. So I think that's a really wise position. I think a lot people who are in that situation, if you're looking at your set of options and your batna is way worse than what you currently have it and you're feeling anger, frustration, hostility towards your employer, that may be a real risk factor brewing for you as an individual and you probably should

change that and adopt a different attitude about what's going on at work because that situation may change and you may be forced to turn to one of those batanas. And so I think that's really, that's just more power of why this batonet exercise. I love this. I'm going to use that for the rest of my life. I'm going to use this concept of Batna. I know you didn't invent it, but I'm going to attribute it to you. I think that that's a really good application of it. If you're one of these folks who are kind of a little bit of this abstract, not really comfortable with my work situation right now, it's just that's the ultimate tool to figuring it out. The attribution belongs to Roger Fisher and William Uri, who are the authors of a book called Getting to Yes. I credit Paula Pan.

So let's flip that. Instead of being overcompensated, let's say you either don't have a job or you have a job where you are underpaid and you're looking for a new job. How do you negotiate when you really need the job? Because I want to frame this in terms of time, right? We remember, or many of us remember, 2008, a time when a lot of people were losing their jobs and people would go for months without a single offer. And it truly was a desperate situation. If you're in a 2008-style situation, to a certain extent, you do need to take what you. You do need to take what you can get. Sometimes that negotiation then is not necessarily, especially if it's a smaller, small to mid-sized company that might have a limited budget, sometimes that negotiation might not

be in the form of compensation. It might be in the form of flexibility. If it's a small company, they may not have the budget to pay you more, but they may be flexible with regard to your work hours. Does it have to be strictly nine to five or do you have some flexibility around when you come in and when you go. Or do you have some flexibility in terms of, you know, they give standard, you know, federal holidays off. But if you choose to work a federal holiday, do you have the optionality of making that a floating day and taking a different day instead? So those types of things that don't really cost the employer anything, but that make your life easier, particularly for smaller companies, that can sometimes be where the negotiation comes in. And then remember, 2008 doesn't last forever because 2008 quickly, you know, in the span of five years, you know, it becomes a very different economic environment with a very different set of circumstances.

These things change quickly. I mean, Scott, you were just talking about the enormous power that many employees had in 2021, 2022, and how quickly that changed by 2025. Like, we have no idea what this situation is going to look like in 2008. it might flip back again, or there might be some third alternative that no one has even thought of before because there's no precedent for it. That's the situation in 2028. We don't know. I think that brings up an interesting question here because I'm thinking about my career, right? I joined Bigger Pockets. I was an early employee. And I actually never asked for a raise in all those years.

I did ask for the opportunity to sell, earn commission. And I did ask for equity in the company over time. And my base, I believe, my base salary remained well below that of industry peers through to my stepping down last year on that front. And I don't know, you know, you never know how things go or how they turn out or whatever in there. But for me, there was always an instinct of doing that, not just for the greater upside that it afforded in my career, which for me paid off in various ways, but also as a de-risk, right? when times are bad, you don't get that bonus. You don't get the commissions. You don't, the equity is not worth as much or whatever, but you're still, you know,

as long as you're living off of that lower, you know, base salary and that's well within your means, everything is good to go. Do you think that there's a case for that? Because I think when people frame the negotiation conversation, it's about how much base salary can I get? You talked about flexibility, but can flexible, what are your thoughts or reactions to this concept of going for more of the other stuff, the high upside equity or the, the commissions or the bigger bonus targets in the lower base as a way to defray these risks in the

future? Or consider that in your bet not. I see that as a huge green flag. As an employer, I see that as a massive green flag when somebody proposes that because what that tells me is that they want a structure in which our incentives are aligned. That when we do better, they do better, but they're willing to accept a little bit of that risk. And they don't want to be an outsized drain on our resources when times are tough. So I actually had a conversation like that this morning. I was talking to a contractor who works for afford anything. She works with us on a monthly basis, but she charges a flat fee per month. And at the time that we're recording this, it's right after the holidays. She took a couple of weeks off around the holidays, but she still charged her full amount. And so I was

like, okay, we're going to have to have a conversation about this. So this morning brought it up. The way that I phrased it, I didn't pinpoint this particular situation. I said, hey, as we think through the year ahead, because we were having a 2026 planning conversation, how do you want to handle time off? Because this is going to come up again, right? This is how do we want to structure this working agreement such that we handle time off? And so we began talking about that. And that made it a more comfortable conversation because I wasn't saying, hey, you just took two weeks off,

you know, which can be a little. it can put somebody on the defensive. It's, hey, I want to plan how to have a good future together. Broadly, how do we want to handle this? So we began having a conversation about that. And where that led was to her proposing, hey, what do you think about a performance-based bonus? And I loved that she, I should have thought of it. I didn't think of it. I loved that she brought that up because what that told me is that not only does she, is she invested in working with me for the year ahead, but also she shares my objectives, my revenue objectives, right? And she wants to see those come into fruition. And she's, in a sense, putting some skin in the game to make sure that those

come into fruition. So, yes, I love that. I think it's a massive green flag. I think structurally it will improve your, if you're willing to think about that, if you listen to this, that it will improve your batina, right? Because if you're saying, hey, I'm making $130,000 right now at this job that's work remote. And I cannot make that at another job right now. They're just not hiring for that job and my my alternative is 115 in office in my city where I have to resume commuting that's a really tough position that's a really weak mental position to negotiate from you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna have to really retrain your brain to be grateful to your employer for the situation which may be very challenging depending on your circumstances or you can

say you know what my bat an is I can take a job for 8.5 out of the startup that has a really nice equity package that could pay off that's a different batna right then and We're framing that. And that's where I think the power of this comes up in opening your mind to that, that flexibility and your strategy will create options that you didn't see before. And really, those options are first and foremost accessible to people pursuing something along the spectrum of financial independence, right? Because someone who spends $115,000 a year can't take that job at the startup for 85 with the

equity component. It's just not an option. But somebody who spends 70 can. That's where your life and your expenses and how you manage every thing. thing comes into play at work and the opportunities that you'll receive there. It's all one board with multiple pieces on it that you have to move. Can I also, before I forget, I wanted to say something about relating back to our earlier conversation.

I just mentioned what to me is a green flag from the point of view of an employer. There's also something that's a red flag and it relates back to what we were talking about earlier, the person who has, who's overcompensated, the person who's looking around saying, wow, my bat not everywhere else is a lot worse, which is another way of saying I'm making more here than I could elsewhere, which is another way of saying I'm overcompensated here. When that happens and when a person begins to view a company as something that should support their life, the way that that often gets expressed is that the employee will start to cite personal living costs as the reason for asking for a raise. And it's a reflection of the mentality of

this company exists to support me. Not I provide. labor in exchange for compensation, but rather this company exists to support me. There are a lot of founders who will build quote-unquote lifestyle businesses. It's an extension of that lifestyle business thinking where somebody who is not an owner, who is an employee, will still see it as a lifestyle business. And so, you know, I had a situation once where one of my employees, the first time that she asked for a raise, she cited an expanded scope of work, expanded responsibilities, various accomplishments that she had made within the past year.

Like, that was the proper way to make that request. I noticed she only did that once, and then every time that she asked for a raise after that, she cited the fact that her costs were higher, you know, the fact that her general cost of living had gone up. And in retrospect, I didn't realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I think that was when her mindset was shifting and she was beginning to see the company more and more. as a vehicle that would fund her life goals rather than her employer. All right. We're going to take our final ad break. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full

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when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP money. Thanks for sticking with us. Would you expect the company to give you a pay decrease if cost of living went down in a year? Right. Of course not, right? That's not how it works. It's a market. It's a free market. It's what is the value of your skill set compared to peers

who can do the same job in that environment. think that that inversion is really helpful. I think that's the biggest takeaway. We kind of position this show is how do you negotiate your salary for someone who feels that they're ready for a raise? And I think that we also wanted to talk about how you should think about that negotiation in context of a really hard job market for people with your skill set here. And I think the two things that are so powerful about the conversation you brought here are that mentality, right? This is a market. I'm not entitled to a cost of living adjustment. That's not how that works. And then if my bat anna is much worse after I perform that, being grateful.

Because that will just change your attitude about it and really de-risk a situation that I promise you, is it ticking time bomb for you right now? And you don't even know it if that's your attitude towards your employer in this environment and you have a bad badna. I think that that's really, really wonderful input here. Yeah. And just reframing it, telling people how to reframe it in their mind. It's one thing for your boss to be like, I'm not responsible for your day-to-day life. it's another thing for Paula Panta come on and be like, hey, maybe you should start thinking about it in a different way. Since the Batna is by definition the best alternative, the best job you could get in there, you're interviewing for a job.

Can you walk me through how you spot green flags or red flags in your interview process, Paula? So our process is we will advertise a job. We get a huge slew of initial applications. From that, we narrow it down to the top third. 30 or so, and then we do, our first phase is what's called an asynchronous interview, where we ask them to send us video replies to a series of questions. And based on that, we get a sense, especially because we're a company that requires a lot of collaboration and communication, and we have a lot of public-facing elements in interacting

with our community. We use the asynchronous interview to look at the top 30 or so, I guess in terms of the alternative, right? that cohort of 30 is essentially our cohort of best alternatives, right? Like from the perspective of any one person in that basket, the other 29 people are our other potential alternatives. Based on those asynchronous interviews, we then whittle it down to the top 12 to 15 or so. We'll have a phone call with them and have a more developed out interview.

And then when we narrow it down to actually something that we're about to do for the first time, When we narrow it down to the top three to five candidates, in the past, we always did Zoom interviews. We're actually stopping that, and now we insist on face-to-face interviews with the top three to five. From a hiring point of view, at the time of hiring, we have a very clear picture of who the viable alternatives are, because we can see the candidates as a cohort. I think where that becomes less clear is as a person's tenure at a company increases, two things happen. Number one, the scope of their job naturally changes. That just tends to happen over time as the needs of the company change. So the scope of their role changes. And related to that,

the outsider external conditions that we face also changes. And what that means is that four or five, six years down the line, the role that they're in might look very different from the role they were originally hired for. And they may or may not be the best. candidate for what that role has become. And it's a lot harder to see that because of the fact that it has been such a slow evolution. Running a business is so hard, right? Because because, and like, from the other side of it, when you hire someone, right, the goal is not to fire them. The goal is not to have a layoff at some point in the future. The goal is for that person to thrive, right? And so you have to have a picture where you're going. It has to be reasonably accurate. That person has to develop.

they have to be flexible enough to fit the inevitable changes to what you thought was going to happen in there. And they have to have a path that allows them to grow, especially if they're an ambitious superstar that really will push that envelope and get going in there. And all of that has to be married to a strategy and a structure that makes sense first. That comes before the people. If you try to fit people into a structure, you get a disaster. But if you try to take a structure, that's very clear. You find the great people to fit into that. You can do that.

And then you have to figure out how people map. through, it's just an incredible, incredibly difficult challenge that we didn't always get right at bigger pockets for sure. Well, we try to do our best, and that's the challenge that, I think, you know, was going on the other side across these raised negotiations and stuff that you're thinking about as an employee is what makes sense for the business. And they want their people to succeed and thrive over time. That is not, this is not like we want to, how we pay people as little as possible.

It's how do we thrive. And we love to pay people more if they, are growing and clearly contributing that much more as well. Exactly. And you know, it's funny when we talk about raises, I mean, the raise is the shiny object. The raise is the thing that grabs people's attention. But what is a raise conversation really? It is a conversation about how do I become more valuable to this organization?

And how does the organization, in turn, provide me with the clarity, the understanding that I need in order to become more valuable? That's why I love the scorecard concept so much is, you know, because not all organizations provide that level of clarity. And if yours doesn't, then your first job is to get clarity on what you need to do in order to be supremely valuable to your company because you do want to be indispensable. Like the goal is to one day be the person who they describe as, all right, that's our key man risk or that's our key person risk.

What are the red flags? You're in an interview. Someone's made it pretty far. They've gotten through the basics here, the screening process here, but they're sitting down, and they're one of, you know, three or four candidates you're choosing between. What are some red flags that come up that make you be like, yeah, nope, I'm going to go with the batina, another candidate. Anyone who tries to dictate process rather than substance. So, for example, if they insist, I'm a big believer in synchronous meetings, if they insist on, no, no, no, I do a lot better in async, you know, And that's how I want to communicate with the team is asynchronously. Or if they insist on operating in strictly in their time zone and not the time zone of the overall team,

I mean, those are sort of smaller examples. But anyone who is trying to dictate process rather than substance, because I'm hiring you for the substance of your role. Because I'm hiring you because you have individual expertise in a given subsidiary domain. and I want that domain expertise. But my job as the owner of the company is to provide the structure, the processes, the procedures, to provide the scaffolding under which that operates.

And to the extent that that scaffolding starts to get challenged, in a context in which input has not actively been invited, then that undermines the scaffolding of the organization. And that is a huge red flag. Love it. Well, Paula, this has been really fascinating conversation. Thank you for bringing all of these insights into the fine art of negotiation, specifically as it relates to getting a raise or negotiating with an employer. But like you said, negotiation happens all day, every day in all aspects of your life. Do you have any good further resources or learning for folks if they're interested in pursuing the subject further? We have a course on negotiation where once a week we do typically Tuesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern. We get on.

Zoom and do live practice calls. So every week we will have a different mock negotiation. Some weeks it's Halloween and your neighbor put up a bunch of haunted house decorations and that means that there's a big crowd, a big rowdy crowd at your neighbor's house and you just want quiet. Like sometimes it'll be that. Sometimes it'll be a landlord talking to a tenant. Sometimes it'll be an employer talking to an employee. So like we every week we have a different different mock negotiation. When I talk about landlord tenant or employer-employee, there's a power dynamic differential. When I talk about spouses unloading the dishwasher, then you've got equal pairing. So we make sure that we have a variety of those types of situations

so that people can actually practice, like get, what I was talking about earlier, like in many countries, you get that practice by negotiating for oranges at the market or buying a sweater or socks. And in the United States, we don't get that. So we've set up a way for people to actually get on Zoom with one another and practice in a simulated low-stakes environment so that when it's time to actually have those difficult conversations, you have the muscle memory for it. So you can find out more afford anything.com slash your next raise. I love it. Paula, thank you so much for your time today and all of your tips. These were really, really helpful.

I could have used them several years ago. And we will talk to you soon. Thank you. All right, Scott, that was Paula, with some pretty amazing tips for negotiating in all aspects of your life, but especially in your salary. What did you think of her advice? I've really enjoyed Paula's perspective on a great number of things here. And I think that if I'm distilling what we learned today down into best practices, It's one establishing a best alternative to a negotiated agreement or best alternative,

your bat anna. And remembering that that batonet is not, if you're not creative with that baton, you can really trap yourself mentally, right? If you're being paid 130 right now base in your neck, your baton has 115 and another base salary has to requires you going to work, that's not a very good situation for your mental health. Your baton is probably something else, something that offers more creative upside, something that has, you know, different opportunities and chances. So be creative with that, understand what that looks like, and be really smart about that.

And then I think using that to inform how much leverage you have going into negotiation is just wonderful advice. I love that we were able to dialogue back and forth and add in a written scorecard or equivalent. We are going to be building a little section of our Bigger Puckets Money website called BiggerPucketsMoney.com slash small business. And on there, I will put in some of the resources that I talked about here that will be written for someone who's hiring, but they can be very useful, I think, as well for someone who's negotiating a raise or wants to get better clarity from their boss about what they ought to be doing with their job and what good looks like from a KPI standpoint. I think that's really important having this in place, and then good documentation, doing what you said you're going to do and making sure that the numbers that are supposed to go, which you may not be able to directly influence. You may only be able to indirectly influence them with lead indicators or lead activity. All of that's really important in the context of actually getting what you want, which is in the end more more.

money for yourself in the context of negotiation with your employer around compensation. I don't think it's always about more money, more flexibility, more. When I first started working at bigger pockets, I didn't want to go into the office five days a week. So I negotiated coming into the office two days a week. And that was worth more to me than a little bit more in my salary. That was particularly rare at that point in time. So yes, there are outliers. Well, you have to be an awesome employee. We were not having that discussion with a lot of people besides Mindy back in those days. But also, I brought to the table a lot of things that other people couldn't because I had lifetime experience. And you can't get 20 years of lifetime experience out of a

25-year-old employee. Mindy was willing and ready to wield the banhammer in the bigger pockets forum. I love rules. I love following the rules. So, yeah. You enforce those. You enforce those. rules. That's for sure. Yes, I did. But, you know, I brought other things to the table, too, Scott. Oh, like this podcast. Yeah, there's so many things. I'm also just a pretty face. But yeah, I mean, that's a good example of, you know, things that that are like intangible. When Josh first asked me to send in my resume, I'm like, uh, I've been a stay-at-home mom for eight years. My resume is eight years out of date. It doesn't have anything to do with anything I'm doing here. So I just sent him a list of all the real estate deals I'd done instead.

And he's like, oh, this is great. And I was like, well, thank goodness, because I don't know what I would do if he wanted a real resume. But it's all about solving the problem. Josh had a problem, and I solved it in an amazing way, if I do say so myself. Yeah, there's a million ways to negotiate on this. This is just our take on it for today. And let us know how you've negotiated or how you've engineered pay increases or raises

in your career, either at our Facebook. group, Facebook.com slash groups slash BP money, or here in the comments in our YouTube channel. Or you can email Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com or Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com and let us know your negotiating tips or what's worked for you or what you've asked for outside of financial compensation. All right, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, Chow for now, Highland Cow. When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees,

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